Listening To Kabir Amidst The Ruins Of A Textile Mill
By Vidyadhar Date
19 September, 2012
Countercurrents.org
I recently went to a music recital by the well known singer Mukhtiar Ali. He rendered Sufi and Kabir songs in a nice-looking venue, very unusual, right next to a lake and in the heart of Mumbai. It was at Byculla near the Jijamata Udyan. .
But one felt uneasy here because this is a land which should belong to common people and workers with whose blood and sweat have grown the fortunes of the upper class of Mumbai. The venue was in the sprawling premises of the New Great Eastern textile mill now on its last legs . The developer’s axe may fall on it any time as in the case of redevelopment of several other mills which have been turned into luxury residential estates and shining malls, symbols of consumerism and decadence.
Many people do not even know that such nice sites exist in Mumbai. The rich have always enclosed them. Many textile mills in Mumbai had lovely water bodies and trees with a lot of bio diversity in their sprawling premises. The water was needed for the mills. I first heard of the water tanks and rare tree species in mills from architect Karan Grover who is perhaps the only one who has created a photographic record of the beauty that lay within the mill premises, hidden from the public. He mentioned this several years ago in a seminar in Mumbai but all this work remains unknown to most people. Mill owners have scrupulously kept the public away from the premises.They did not allow access even to a study group, appointed by the Maharashtra government and headed by reputed architect Charles Correa in the 1990s. So the committee could only study the lands in and around the 25 mills of the public sector National Textile Corporation in Mumbai. One an imagine the contempt with which the mill owners must be treating ordinary people.
The water bodies and trees in the few remaining mills attract lovely water birds. Our trade unions were perhaps so busy fighting for the basic rights of workers that they forgot to tell people about the beauty that lay inside the mills which looked so drab and dull from outside. Now luxury apartments are coming up in mills. At the entrance of New Great mill I saw a board of Mahindra Lifestyle developers .Indeed Lifestyle is the new buzz word of the new rich. After the destruction of the lives of the working people in the heart of Mumbai , this class is setting up lifestyle shopping malls and stores to cater to the consumption mania of the new parasitical rich preying on the city’s and country’s public resources.
As for the venue of the recital, it was cut off from the rest of the environment with a glass enclosure. So, it was transparent but air conditioned which was such a pity because this lake side venue with access to huge open space did not really need air conditioning. Early in the evening, one could see the lake through the glass but as darkness descended the atmosphere actually became a bit eerie. Next to this venue was a show room in the mill premises selling antique furniture. Imagine it occupies some 50,000 sq ft of land, according to its own website. And there is many times more land in the mill premises. And that too in the heart of Mumbai. The government could have easily set aside for public use the land of many industrial units closed down in Mumbai city, Thane and suburbs. One can imagine the corruption involved in the land deals. So there is no shortage of land in Mumbai really. The point is it is so unequally distributed. So there is an irony in this consumption and display of culture without any access to the working class.
This display of culture in the mill premises reminds me of the very stinging criticism made by Rustom Bharucha, a distinguished theatre scholar, of a cultural programme put up by the rich in Mukesh mill in Colaba on the seaside in 1997.. The rich came in barges, small boats, by sea and the kitchen and dining staff of the luxury Oberoi hotel arrived with burners and tandoors, cutlery and crockery..(mentioned in Bharucha’s book The politics of cultural practice – thinking theatre in an age of globalization). But when workers protested and the programme was held up, the rich young wondered when India will get its act together. Bharucha counters this correctly by observing that we have to get our act together not for vested interests but for our own people. We have to improve the lot of our people. This was in the 50th year of India’s independence. This mill burnt down in the 1980s facilitating the use of land for commercial purposes. Hundreds of workers were left jobless.
The Indian defence establishment claims ownership of the Mukesh mill land. It was requisitioned by the government in 1943 and was leased to the Colaba mill in 1974. The land is now in possession of the Transport Corporation of India and is used mainly for film shootings, especially horror films and some believe the land is haunted and they refuse to shoot at night !
Several developers are eyeing the seaside land for development of a luxury complex.
Irregularities in the use and sale of the land of several mills have figured in Parliament and in courts .
It is ironic that much this vulgar, malignant and luxury development has come in mills on a road named after Senapati Bapat, an armed revolutionary turned Gandhian, who led the first major mass struggle of landless peasants evicted from their lands for Mulshi dam in Pune district more than a hundred years ago.
The textile mill land used for consumption for the obscenely rich runs into millions of sq ft in a city starved land for most people . The Phoenix mill complex, developed by the Ruias, has among other things a fancy mall, a multiplex cinema and a bowling alley in what many would see as a slavish imitation of the American way of life. The Ruias owe their fortune to cotton, the very name Ruia, is derived from the Hindi word Rui for cotton. It is an irony that while cotton growers in Vidarbha are committing suicide mill owners are making huge fortunes through sale of textile mill land. It was in Nagpur in cotton-rich Vidarbha that the Tatas set up their first industrial unit, the Empress textile mills, and it was given the name in 1877 to coincide with Queen Victoria being proclaimed the empress of India. Mr Ratan Tata was entrusted with running the mill for several years before he became head of the Tata empire. But he could not do much to nurse it.
Now, Mr Adi Godrej, president of the Confederation of Indian industry, wants farmers to sell their land and invest the money in companies. He says rural land is uneconomical and has the lowest appreciation of all assets. (interview with Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka magazine of 15 September, 2012). Here is another irony while rural land is considered uneconomical, urban land, being grabbed by the rich, has soaring prices because the rich are literally capturing land. Now, the rich want to capture rural land as well and efforts are being made to evict the poor from villages and push them into urban peripheries with degraded living standards.
Phoenix owners make no secret of the fact that they are in a big way in the real estate market and have formed what they call market cities in centres like Bangalore and Chennai. With big money flowing in from the mill lands, many mill owners are laughing their way to the bank. Apporpriately perhaps, a theatre venue in the plush Phoenix commercial complex is named Comedy Stores known for stand up comedy shows. They are in the business of entertainment, commerce , retail and consumption on the Phonex mill land , some 3.5 million sq ft of it in the heart of Mumbai. Their website claims that this can be a model for the country and they say they are the thought leaders. `Think, Lead and Dominate’ is the slogan. All this cries out for the attention of serious minded people.
Bombay Dyeing mill’s land has among other things a fancy Hard Rock Café which promises soon to have a celebration of things Mexican. Shake a leg to Latino beats. Be a part of the tradition, says the promotion literature. Yes, our rich want to ape alien traditions but humiliate our traditions and culture. The new mill district is going all out to erase, wipe out the working class culture of the area.
Talking of Mexico, it is amazing how our cultural elite completely blacks out in its discussion any reference to the revolutionary mural tradition of Mexico and other Latin American countries.
Coincidence has it that the textile workers of Mexico played an important role in the Mexican revolution in the early part of the 20th century as depicted in the book Revolution within revolution – Mexican labour regime 1910-23 written by Jeffrey Bortz.
All mills going in for redevelopment of their land in Mumbai were bound by government rules in the early 1990s to submit one third of the land for public housing and one third to the municipal corporation as a recreational space.The developer was allowed to develop only a third of the land. But then the rules were bent and many see this was due to the l nexus between the politicians, bureaucrats and capitalists. The new rules left a lot of scope for manipulation requiring mills to hand over much less land for the public. But many mills are not giving even this minimum required land. That is corporate governance for you.
Much of this land was originally very much public, owned by the government or the civic body. It was leased to the mills. In some cases the leases had expired and it would be worth studying the phenomenon. The government could have taken back the land or heavily increased the rent. But the capitalists were allowed to reap a bonanza running into hundreds of crores of rupees. The ownership of the land of some of the mills is very much in dispute and a few cases are pending in court.
A part of the Mathurads mill complex has been converted into the fashionable Blue Frog , a fun place and cited as a popular night-out destination and often figures in writing on upper class lifestyle.
The textile mills of Mumbai also had a great heritage value. But profit and corruption have prevailed and most mills are destroyed by developers unlike in Bradford in the U.K. and some other parts of the world where mills have been preserved as part of industrial archaeology and heritage. In Mexico the Rio Blanco mill, which is more than a hundred years old, should be preserved with the same esteem as is given to baroque churches and pre-Columbian ruins, points out historian Barry Carr. At least 70 workers of this mill were shot dead during an uprising in 1907. In Mumbai, many workers were killed in 1908 when they protested against the arrest of Lokmanya Tilak. Such militant history is sought to be wiped out by the rulers and industrialists.
The government can still preserve mills owned by the public sector NTC. But they all want to make money by selling the land. With a little intelligence and imagination the private developers could have saved parts of the private mills even while on a spree for commercialization.
Some leaders of the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena are openly in the field of real estate development unconcerned with preserving the mill heritage. In fact, top figures from the parties are involved in developing the Kohinoor mill land right opposite the Shiv Sena Bhavan in Dadar. A monstrous glass box tower structure is coming up changing the whole landscape of the environment-friendly area of Shivaji Park, now dotted with old trees and buildings built on a human scale. It is not surprising that the two parties are currently strongly opposing the proposal to retain the heritage character of the area surrounding Shivaji Park.
Mumbai has a fairly active movement for heritage conservation and preserving open spaces but it is mainly upper class dominated and has shown little interest in protecting working class or industrial heritage. This heritage also cries out for being recorded in a documentary film format but little has been done in this regard. So, it was a pleasant surprise to see last week a documentary on Bharatmata cinema theatre in Lalbaug, which completes 75 years this year. It is one of the few surviving old style cinema houses, exclusively screening Marathi films and is on the land of a public sector textile mill land.
The film made by students of the School of Media and Cultural Studies of the Tata Institute of Social Science depicted the theatre atmosphere well. It could have done better by incorporating in it the context of labour and social history of the area. Concerted efforts are sporadically made by activists and some artistes to save this theatre and Girgangaon, the mill area itself . These could have provided an interesting footage. Interviews with the theatre’s usher show how intelligent common people are. He lives far away in distant suburb which itself is a good theme for a film to focus on the way the working people are thrown out of this working class district. The film was shown by Vikalp at Alliance Francaise along with some other short films. One was a highly experimental film about cycle rickshaws in Delhi which was completely divorced from the cruel treatment that the drivers face from the police and others in the administration. If the makers had seen Bimal Roy’s film Do Bigha Zameen they would have understood the issue much better.
Young film makers would also benefit with a good grounding in the history of films. The day after this screening I saw the iconic documentary film with a revolutionary approach, Hour of Furnaces, which could be a text book case for the study of neo colonialism. It depicted how the Spanish, the Briish and then United States subjugated Argentina, culturally, politically, economically in every way. It was shown at the Films Division thanks to the initiative taken by Avijit Mukul Kishore. The film made in the 1960s is directed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino.
There is comparatively very little study by the Indian academics of the throbbing subject of textile history and inequality in urban areas and so on. The one major book on Mumbai’s historic textile strike of 1982 is written by a Dutch sociologist Hubert Van Hersch and more recently a book on the mill lands is written by Darryl D’Monte, a former resident editor of the Times of India. Raj Chandavarkar of Cambridge university did some excellent work in working class history and it is a pity he died young at 52 years in 2006. Another interesting book on the sociology of textile workers is again by non-academics, Neera Adarkar, a socially conscious architect and Meena Menon, activist.
It is interesting that a multi media exhibition on Mumbai’s textile history and radical politics is now on view at the Bhau Daji Lad museum in the Jijamata Udyan at Byculla in collaboration with the Institute of International Visual Arts which is based in the U.K. It draws on various works including of Sudhir Patwardhan, noted painter, who is one of the few to portray the working people in his works. He got to learn issues at first hand when he worked as a radiologist in the municipal KEM hospital in the working class district of Parel in the seventies.
Coming back to the Kabir recital. Kabir represents a total rejection of the craving for private property. Be ready to give up your worldly possessions if you want to join me, he declared . Kabir is now becoming a cult figure in cultural circles. One looks forward to the Kabir festival coming up in January, next year. But Kabir is much more than a passive, peace loving, well meaning saint that the upper class would like us to believe.
Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist and author of the book Traffic in the era of climate change . Walking, cycling, public transport need priority. E mail d[email protected]
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